Popular Thai lettuce wraps remained, the leaves of Boston lettuce forming cups for strips of chicken, cool noodles and peanut sauce.
Toss sauce with cooked and cooled noodles, a load of mint, Thai basil, and/or cilantro, and lime juice.
Add cooled noodles to the large bowl.
There, cool rice noodles are topped with crisp vegetables, sweet herbs, pungent sauces and usually a little savory element, like sizzled fragrant beef or nuggets of fried spring rolls.
Cucumber granita aside, they're just about the freshest thing I can imagine: a jumble of crunchy raw vegetables, soft, aromatic leaves and cool, squidgy noodles, all stuffed snugly into a featherlight rice wrapper.
Oh, it's punctuated by the occasional happy hum of a diner chewing pork or guzzling the fat-flecked broth, or even by the faint chatter of the chef's radio, but it's the slurps that take center stage, long and loud and enthusiastic, showing appreciation for the chef's métier even as they cool the noodles down to edible temperature.
The shipping and handling costs on my orders ranged from $26.99 to $29.99, or the equivalent of a delicious meal at a Chinese restaurant if you ordered all the things you love, like crispy and spicy shrimp, cool sesame noodles, fragrant dumplings and...
An unusual dish, Chengdu cold jelly ($3.25), named for the capital of Sichuan province, is not jelly at all, but a delicious mass of gelatinous noodles, served cool with lots of garlic, hot oil, soy, Sichuan pepper and vinegar.
Scooping it out halfway through cooking, as Roddy recommends, seems to work a treat, as does allowing the drained noodles to cool for a minute before adding them to the sauce, as in Baccanelli and Barreca's recipe.
Go back to your pasta and drain out the water over a sink, then run cool water over the noodles (this stops the cooking process and helps them not stick together. ) Take two plates, scoop out pasta onto them, cover the middle of the pasta heap with your sauce, and voila!
